[Python-Dev] Python 3.x and bytes (original) (raw)

Ethan Furman ethan at stoneleaf.us
Wed May 18 17:57:46 CEST 2011

Greg Ewing wrote:

Ethan Furman wrote:

On the one hand we have the 'bytes are ascii data' type interface, and on the other we have the 'bytes are a list of integers between 0 - 255' interface. I think the weird part is that there exists a literal for writing a byte array as an ascii string, and furthermore that it's the only kind of literal available for bytes.

That is the point I was trying to make -- thank you for stating it more clearly than I managed to. :)

Personally I think that the default literal syntax for bytes, and also the form produced by repr(), should have been something more neutral, such as hex,

Agreed. It is surprising to extract an element out of bytes, and not end up with bytes, but with an int -- if the repr used something besides the plain ascii representation, this would not be an expectation. For comparison, when one extracts an element out of a str one gets a str -- not the int representing the unicode code point.

with the ascii form available for use when it makes sense.

As for

--> someothervar[3] == b'd' there ought to be a literal for specifying an integer using an ascii character, so you could say something like if someothervar[3] == c'd': which would be equivalent to if someothervar[3] == ord(b'd') but without the overhead of computing the value each time at run time.

Given that we can't change the behavior of b'abc'[1], that would be better than what we have.

+1

Ethan

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